On hand for Unrivaled’s penultimate hours, several major women’s basketball stars sounded off on the state of the WNBA labor negotiations.
BROOKLYN—Unlike the final periods of the Unrivaled playoff games that will be staged on Monday, the clock is ticking on the 2026 WNBA season.
(Photo by Noah Graham/NBAE via Getty Images)
Women’s basketball is hosting a de facto summit in New York, one headlined by the semifinal stage of the Unrivaled postseason at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center (7:30 p.m. ET, TNT/TruTV). Phantom BC faces Vinyl BC in part one of the quest for three-on-three glory, while Breeze BC battles Mist BC in the latter showing. Monday’s winners will meet in a winner-take-all championship finale back at the Unrivaled hub in Miami.
What happens next, however, is anyone’s guess: the Unrivaled finale could stand as the first chapter of an exhilarating hardwood trilogy combined with the college basketball postseason and the WNBA tip-off, but the latter’s arrival remains in flux due to ongoing collective bargaining agreement negotiations. The two sides are eight days away from a reported landmark of Mar. 10: if the framework of an agreement isn’t reached by then, the start of the 2026 season (currently scheduled for May 8) could be affected.
Will There Be a Strike?
After the four clubs engaged in Monday’s shootarounds, populous scrums surrounded the faces of the game Kelsey Plum and Breanna Stewart, both of whom are listed as vice presidents on the Women’s National Basketball Association’s Players Association board. Both lauded the progress in revenue sharing seen since the ratification of the last deal in 2020, but continued to hint that it won’t be enough to carry the weight in a new agreement.
“I want to play, and players want to play,” Plum, the first vice president, said, per Alexa Philippou of ESPN. “We’re going to continue to negotiate and do everything we possibly can to get this done in a timely fashion…I’ve always been someone that’s focused on the gain, not the gap. To be honest, I think if you look at where we’ve come from, shoot, since I came into the league until now, and now that we’re in a revenue share, it’s a tremendous win.”
“I think that, while we still are fighting for a lot of different things, we have to realize that the rev share is a win, especially just even coming from the 2020, CBA, and the ones before that,” Stewart, who plays for Mist in Unrivaled and the New York Liberty in the WNBA, concurred. “Now, as the league makes money, we make money…Really just kind of being aware of that as a whole. That’s not just me as a player. That’s me thinking as an overall businessperson. Nobody wants to lose money, so how can we try to prevent that in all ways possible?”
Adam Silver Involved in CBA Negotiations
That burning question and more have crossed over into the NBA, where commissioner Adam Silver noted that talks were inching toward an “11th hour” during the recent All-Star Weekend festivities in Inglewood. While Silver said he’d “love to … put pressure on everybody” in the name of obtaining an agreement, Stewart said that the NBA boss has not been present at either the in-person or virtual meetings since those comments.
Revenue sharing continues to stand as an explosive talking point in their negotiations. While Doug Feinberg of the Associated Press reported on Monday that the league sent a new proposal to the union over the weekend (one headlined by the opportunity for rookie/sophomore standouts to become more immediately eligible for a maximum contract), this latest entry did not adjust the tightly-contested revenue-sharing model.
The players’ union has been said to be aiming for a quarter of gross revenue (generated prior to expenses), a gambit that a source with knowledge of the negotiations labeled “financially unworkable for a sustainable league” to Ballislife.
WNBA Players Won’t Settle
Plum also addressed the idea of a strike, which she and the executive board were permitted to authorize back in December. The Phantom franchise face and Los Angeles Sparks guard doesn’t appear ready to play that card, claiming it would be the “worst thing for both sides.” Still, the steadfast nature of the players’ side of the table doesn’t appear to be going anywhere.
“Obviously, we’re going to continue to negotiate. I can’t emphasize that enough,” Plum said. “We’re not just settling. I want to be very clear about that. But I’m super proud to be a part of this opportunity to change women’s sports.”
The descent upon Brooklyn afforded an opportunity for several major names to voice their thoughts on the negotiations: local standout Natasha Cloud, for example, voiced concerns over finding a proper CBA deal that would benefit all players, not just the headliners of both the freshman and superstar variety.
“My biggest concern has always been the middleman,” Cloud, Stewart’s teammate in New York and Plum’s companion on Phantom, said. “In all of these CBAs, and this isn’t a knock on anyone, our rookies have been taken care of, and our one percent has been taken care of. That’s still true in this CBA. I want everyone to hear me when I say this: we are making a lot of money for the time that we play, and we are very blessed to do so. We are blessed to play basketball for our job and for our means of providing for our families. But, with that, we are still not making enough for that middleman and potentially still not making enough for housing to also be taken off of the table.”
Reigning WNBA Rookie of the Year Paige Bueckers, the headliner for Breeze, expressed frustration that talks had become stagnant, lamenting that “both sides [weren’t] moving” in her own statements. Bueckers is nonetheless apparently willing to tolerate the relative stall if it generates the desired terms she and her on-floor companions are seeking.
“I feel like we need to continue to have these conversations, continue to actually have change implemented for us to move on our stance,” Bueckers said. “We as players, we don’t want to strike. We want to have a season. I love playing basketball, that’s all I want to do. But, again, there are things that need to be handled, and we want to do it as professionals.”
Geoff Magliocchetti is on X @GeoffJMags
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